Monthly Archives: April 2008

I started my blog as a sort of diary so I could look back at it in the future and revise important lessons I had learnt. This didn’t happen, although writing down things I learnt along the way did help ingrain the knowledge into my head better.

More and more people started reading it and I decided to start putting advertisements on it. I’ve always been really interested in creating a web site and have learnt from online tutorials on web design in the past. I didn’t use much of that knowledge in the creation of this blog, but a web site that did come in useful was ProBlogger.

Anyway, getting to the point, I started advertising on my blog, hoping to make some money from it. I didn’t think it would be very successful but I put up advertisements anyway. Worst comes to worst and I waste a bit of my time.

After a while my site was blocked because you’re not allowed advertisements on a WordPress.com free site. My account was reopened on condition that I removed the adverts. I did so, but the links within posts remained.

Many months passed and I didn’t make any money from the adverts. Then I decided to give up my successful poker career while on my gap year. But my blog was still up and I was getting an average of over 30 visits per day. About 2 months ago I checked how my adverts were doing and I found that I had made over $500! Incredible!

$400 of this money came from TowerGaming. A site that I used to play on and have complemented many times, because it’s a great site with great bonuses. Two people deposited $600 with TowerCasino – a total of $1200. I take 25% of that and that’s $300 in my bank account! It’s surprising that I got 2 casino signups since I have never advertised the casino, but the casino must have a good bonus too, just like the poker.

If you have a website and are interested in becoming an affiliate for TowerGaming then click here.

The other site that I made affiliate money from is PokerAffiliateWorld. Through PAW you can become an affiliate of Full Tilt, PokerStars, Party Poker, Mansion, Absolute, Casino on Net and many other poker sites and casinos.

One last point. These are the ways in which I greatly increased the number of visits to my site:

I posted about other poker related topics that I wouldn’t usually write about (ie. playing poker on the Apple iPhone, WSOP)

I put a few of my posts on Digg.

I put a link to my blog in signature at poker forums such as FTR and 2+2.

I now average 30 visits a day although I haven’t blogged for months and I have had days with 500+ visits to my blog.

Remember the more visitors you get to your site, the higher the chance that somebody will click an affiliate link and you’ll make money.

I have a month off from my studies now. I’ve returned home for a week to visit friends and family. A lot of my friends have exams or are learning and I don’t have much to do at home now that I’ve quit poker.

Today I started reading up on investing. I will being studying Maths at University and after that I can see myself going into some sort of finance related job. So learning about investing now will give me a head-start.

I also intend to start investing my own money within the next year. I have a nice amount of money to play with from my poker winnings. I don’t need the money for anything else so nothing’s holding me back from taking a shot at the stock market.

I think that things I’ve picked from poker will help me in the stock world. Patience is a big one. Self control and not risking more than I can afford is also something you learn playing poker. My maths skills are good.

There are other similarities between Poker and Trading too. I was reading today how trading is not gambling. I’ve many a time read articles on how poker isn’t gambling either and even wrote a post on it myself. The same argument applies to trading.

I’m confident I can become a successful trader. The only problem is I don’t have much spare time that I can use to learning the trade. I need time to research on the net and to read books, but I don’t have the time.

So far I’ve been learning from Investopedia and MorningStar and I’ve set up a free money investing account in the Investopedia Stock Market Game. I don’t expect to gain much out of the game, but I started playing poker with play money. Obviously, the real game is completely different to a play money game in poker and I’m sure the same applies to investing, but you can learn the basics from free money games and get familiar with how the game works and different terms used.

If anyone has any advice on trading I’d love to hear it. Please post a comment.